Review: Inside look at Al-Jazeera remains relatively objective

Arriving on the heels of Fahrenheit 9/11, Jehane Noujaim's Control Room both suffers and gains from the inevitable comparisons. It suffers by being less aggressively entertaining than Michael Moore's anti-Bush current events lesson, but it gains from its relatively objective view of the media machine in the Middle East, even as an ability to remain objective is called into question.
The documentary was begun as a look at the inner workings of Al-Jazeera, the controversial Qatar-based satellite news service with an audience of 40 million. Depending on whom you ask, the network is either the prime news source for the diverse Arab world or, as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld put it, "Osama Bin Laden's mouthpiece."

Egyptian-born, Harvard-educated Noujaim, who directed and produced Startup.com, was granted remarkable access to the inner workings of Al-Jazeera and its editorial staff. There she finds that their efforts at factual reporting in such a volatile, partisan situation as the Iraqi war is as successful, and as fallible, as that of Western news networks.

Having had our skepticism honed by some of the excesses of Fahrenheit 9/11, moviegoers at Control Room should be well-attuned to the art of news spin. They will certainly find it in the output of Al-Jazeera, which emphasizes footage of Arab civilian and child war fatalities, as well as the nearby Central Command, the official United States military's media operations, which has its own version of events.  
  


By Hap Erstein
Palm Beach Post Film Writer